Bookmarks Lead to ‘favicon’ Error in Tracker
Host | 3 July 2007 | 4 Reviews »
Missing logo icon causes inaccuracy
What is a favicon?
This question is one that I recently kept asking, and found few people who knew the answer. The reason this question came to light recently, is because one of my clients had a “favicon.ico” coming up as a 404 error page in their tracker, and it was error page which was receiving the most traffic. This was not something I was familiar with, so naturally I asked others, and also did some research. My findings were very interesting and informative.
A favicon (a short name for favorites icon) is a logo icon you will see next to URLs in the address bar of a browser and will show up for bookmarked sites. When someone bookmarks a site, the browsers look for the icon. When a browser does not find a file for the site’s customized icon, the browser will display a default icon (Internet Explorer defaults to its own favicon rather than a custom favicon) and you will get an error in your log files (tracker).
If you would rather not have this error, you can upload a favicon file to the root web directory of your hosted website. When implementing the favicon, make sure the file is named “favicon.ico”. Otherwise, the favicon error page is a way of tracking people who are bookmarking your website.
July 3rd, 2007 at 1:29 pm
I would think that using a custom Favicon is great way to brand your site too. If you can use a smaller version of your website logo people will start associating that with your company and suddenly you have brand recognition.
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:01 pm
I didn’t know that not having a favicon caused other problems. I guess if you really don’t have one then you should make one and add it (perhaps a one pixel white one) so that it doesn’t mess up anything else like you’re suggesting.
July 5th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Thanks for doing the reseach and sharing your findings, Gloria. I agree with Josh about establishing brand recognition.
July 5th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
In reference to Bill Hartzers comment:
I don’t necessarily think Favicon error pages in a tracker are too detrimental. As I mentioned in the article, you can look at as another way to track people that bookmark your site. Because Browsers only search for the Favicon code when someone bookmarks a site, this is the only time an error will show-up in a tracker. As some of the other comments have mentioned, I agree that Favicon’s are the most influential for brand recognition.